medieval historian, archaeologist and writer

Autumn

On one of the first days of October I went walking with my wife. I found my first conker of the year, with the beautiful patina and texture of newborn wood. It’s already wrinkled, like a hard shiny prune. After the walk I went shopping and bought a small collection of objects. I hadn’t intended them to be a collection, but when I looked at them together I was struck how my emotional response to the season was reflected in the things I had chosen. The warm, rich, smoked flavours of Beavertown’s Smog Rocket is full of the scent of bonfires and leaf litter.

Of course, mushrooms are a seasonal crop, so a mushroom themed notebook is perfectly appropriate for this time of year.

Autumn has always felt magical, partly because my birthday falls in October, but also because of other festivals – All Hallows’ and Guy Fawkes’ – and, especially, the build up to Christmas. Magical worlds feel closer, almost tangible, and the sights and smells of the season open seductive little windows to fantasy and fairy tale. Toadstools are very much a part of the mental furniture of fairy story. Sarah Maitland described this quality of fungi beautifully in her book Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales:

“[fungi is a] phenomenon of the forests […] which can give me the same strange shiver of fear as the dream of wolves and as the fairy stories themselves, a sense of being in the presence of something eerie.” (p. 211)

“When you come upon fungi in the woods they have a magical otherworldly appearance, enhanced by the improbable variety of forms and colours: fungi like jelly, like coral, like brains, like tongues flickering out of alder cones, and even, with the weird earthstars (Geastraceae), like aliens from space.” (p.212)

The word toadstool is particularly pregnant with images of the fairy realm, as are many of the extraordinary folkloric names of fungi, names that have welled up from porous seams of folklore buried deep below: Wood Hedgehog, Velvet Brittlegill, Dead Man’s Finger…

Ted Hughes has made an impact on my life in many ways. I read his poetry as a child, and the story The Iron Man had a profound effect on me when I was young. I was so enthralled by it that I made my own audio book version, sitting alone in my bedroom for hours, reading it out into the microphone of a cheap tape recorder. Why on earth I should have done such a thing is lost in time – perhaps by sounding it out I felt I could inhabit the story more profoundly than by simply reading it. The poems contained in Remains of Elmetare altogether of a darker hue, filled, like Autumn, with images of beauty, sadness and decay:

A wind from the end of the sky

Buffs and curries the grizzly bear-dark pelt

Of long skylines

Browsing in innocence

Through their lasting purple aeons

(Heather, 8-12)

The first edition of this volume of poems was conceived as a collaboration with the photographer Fay Godwin: her beautiful black and white images made a subtle counterpoint to Hughes’ dark and sometimes difficult text, sometimes softening, sometimes alleviating the bleakness of the words.

Shorn of those images the poems, though they lose none of their power and artistry, feel harsher and more alienating at times than they should. A reprint of the collection as it was originally conceived would be most welcome.